


Princess Petrichor

by benfic



Category: Saga (Comics)
Genre: ....Issues, Also at some point they swim, F/M, Self Confidence Issues, Trust Issues, [spoilers if you haven't read up to around issue 49], commitment issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-08
Updated: 2018-06-08
Packaged: 2019-05-19 16:21:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14877227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/benfic/pseuds/benfic
Summary: Petrichor knows about the Princess. Not directly-- at least, not what anyone could really call directly; IV hasn’t told her anything, and she’s obviously never met the woman-- but quite enough to be jealous.Petrichor muses somewhat over the Princess she never knew and the... well, whoever he is she knows now. Also, shenanigans.





	Princess Petrichor

**Author's Note:**

> Well, things are happening with the POV and the voice. I tried 'em. I can't guarantee clarity or sense, as usual. This takes place essentially somewhere around issue 49 (because we all remember That issue... and if you don't, it's the official Love Confession), and otherwise whenever you want. 
> 
> I know BKV can't concentrate on every character at once, but I honestly couldn't wait for Petrichor to get more about her inner workings, and you know what they say-- you want something done, do it yourself.

Petrichor knows about the Princess. Not  _ directly--  _ at least, not what anyone could really call directly; IV hasn’t told her anything, and she’s obviously never met the woman-- but quite enough to be jealous.

 

In all fairness, Petrichor has the striking ability to be jealous of anything IV so much as blinks at, so perhaps her feelings can’t be taken quite as seriously as she thinks. 

 

The first time Petrichor makes an acquaintance of the Princess is, naturally, while IV is dreaming. This is also the way she interacts with her in every other context.

 

The Princess is something that, long ago, little Petrichor might have wanted to become. She is all silks and pink dresses, waltzing around in fancy ballrooms with anonymous men. Usually, IV swoops in and twirls her away, and she is just the right height to rest her head on his chest.

 

(Petrichor tends to hit her head on door frames when she enters the room.)

 

On other occasions the Princess is doing other things-- things Petrichor thinks IV probably wouldn’t like her watching (and correctly so), but things she watches all the same, mostly out of a dogged insistence on making herself angry. The Princess is pillowy, and soft, and shaped in that sort of milk-pitcher way with all the curves and orifices that IV probably wants.

 

(Petrichor is shaped more like a ruler, and she has her own opinions on orifice use.)

 

And then there are dreams that involve both the Princess and Squire.

 

Those are the dreams that Petrichor watches most intently, because the Princess has such naturally flowing arms. They gravitate so easily to whomever might need a hug or caress at the moment, in the kind of way that makes Petrichor want to vomit. 

 

(Petrichor isn’t really the hugging type, and on the one occasion Squire asked her if she was to be his Mama now, she responded with a flat, emotionless, “No.” At least, that’s what IV told her she said-- she blacked out for a moment from fear, only to find that Squire had come running to IV a moment later.)

 

There are also dreams where the Princess is shot, or stabbed, or otherwise bleeding out of various parts of her body, but Petrichor pays less attention to those, aside from giving IV’s monitor a quick kiss to snap him out of it. He always wakes up forgetting his dreams when she does that, and usually she is able to excuse it by telling him she’s had a nightmare.

 

In all honesty, she doesn’t remember most of her own dreams.

 

**

 

IV finds Petrichor leaning over her wheel the next day, flopped over like a dead fish, and he runs to her like she’s actually dead, with lots of different things on his screen:  _ bullet wound, pool of blood, fired arrow.  _ He gets there just in time to put his hand on her shoulder and find out that she’s sleeping. Obviously.

 

She wakes up and makes a weird yawning sound that makes him laugh-- he’s gotten kind of used to her weirdness by now-- and asks what the fuck he’s doing there. He says he was worried, and accidentally tells her why with his screen. She rolls her eyes and whacks him (sort of the right amount of gentle-- she’s working on not knocking his wires out every time) before going back to her work.

 

He asks if she’s sleeping alright, and she says yeah, fine, but IV’s not stupid enough to miss the bags under her eyes. So he carries her, against all rightful protests, into bed, and she barely manages to distract him by unbuttoning his shirt.

 

(They both get kind of distracted, after that, and he falls asleep and misses her falling asleep right after he starts dreaming about fish.)

 

When they wake up, he feels better, but she won’t say anything and he worries that things have begun, as usual, to go right back to shit again.

 

**

 

Marko struggles over the way he should address That Guy Who Tried To Cannonize Him Once. Sir? Prince? Just plain ‘Robot’, or ‘IV’? He considers ‘dickhead’, but figures that would lose him all credibility in a second, so instead he just settles for “Hey.”

 

IV looks up from his book. This is the fourth in the Little Deaths series, not that anyone has been counting since Mirella started sleeping with the antlered man and ruined all plotted comprehension. Marko kind of stares at him for a minute, and IV says, “What.”

 

“You have to see this,” Marko says, and walks back into the kitchen.

 

IV’s screen runs through several possibilities, many of them fun--  _ fire, dead passengers, squire made another drawing,  _ but then he lands on not having seen Petrichor in the last hour and gets up, putting the wrapper from the Fadeaway in the book as a bookmark.

 

When IV walks into the kitchen, Petrichor is trying her damn best to boil her rice and failing, and everyone else is letting her know about it. Alana has a camera out, actually, and Petrichor doesn’t even want to know where that came from. Squire, of course, is sitting over by the table with a full set of cutlery just in case.

 

“Sorry,” IV says, and Petrichor fumbles the pot (nearly dropping it into the fucking fire), “but are you  _ cooking?” _

 

“Yes,” Petrichor says, and it carries as much venom as she can possibly inject into Language. Marko keeps his hand over his mouth and tries to stop crying from laughter, and when IV looks past that and back at Petrichor, he realizes--

 

“Are you wearing a  _ dress?” _

 

_ “Yes!”  _ Petrichor yells, and the dress-thing sort of flaps around her ankles. It goes down to the knees, and it’s this unbelievably ugly shade of green, and on  _ top  _ of all that, it’s just-- a dress. Like someone would wear to a party. It’s probably the worst thing anyone in the room has ever seen, even aside from it being on Petrichor.

 

“Right,” IV says. He takes a seat at the table, looking up at her-- well, mostly looking ahead at her (green) ass, but then looking up at her. “May I ask, ah,  _ why?” _

 

“You can’t,” Marko manages, wheezing. “We’ve been trying-- past half hour--”

 

“I want dinner,” Hazel says, looking beguilingly up at Petrichor. Unfortunately, beguiling looks don’t work on  _ non-boiled rice! _

 

“How do you even  _ boil  _ rice?” Petrichor mutters, shoving the pot onto the counter, where it smokes. Alana manages a, “Say what?” and both she and Marko dissolve into laughter again.

 

“Is there water in it?” IV tries.

 

“It’s all  _ seeped in,” _ Petrichor says. “I don’t  _ understand;  _ what am I doing wrong?!” She grabs the spatula and digs it in-- “Oh.” Most of what comes out is burned.

 

“I’ll take care of-- don’t worry-- mess--” Marko manages, doubled over at the counter, and Alana shoves Petrichor out of the kitchen, not really caring about the fact that Petrichor could remove her head in a second for it. IV follows, right up until Petrichor enters the bedroom and shoves him out of the way.

 

“Sorry,” he says, sort of mechanically. So far,  _ sorry  _ has never solved anything (coming too soon, asking about her family, talking about the future, coming too soon again), but he keeps trying. “Do you-- I mean, are you...”

 

“Changing? Yes.” Petrichor has realized, suddenly, that this was, is, and is going to continue to be stupid. And shitty. And so she is changing back into something that feels like her, which in this case means a swimsuit, because she hasn’t given up on Plan B. IV stares at her. “Drone pervert.”

 

He snaps out of it.  _ “Excuse me?” _

 

“Get changed,” she says, and he sort of watches her leave, mired in a confusion that can only manifest itself on his screen as  **_? ? ?_ ** .

 

Two minutes later, Petrichor hops out of the ship onto the square inch of dry land that exists before the water, fingering the edge of her swim trunks. She still feels sort of weird in swim gear, made by her or otherwise.

 

“You made these for me?” IV asks, coming up behind her. She doesn’t dare look at his screen.

 

“Yes,” she says, shrugging. Wasn’t that hard; not after all those seams on that dress. And he’s lucky she didn’t pattern them, either. “To match your weirdly short bedtime shorts.”

 

“They’re--”

 

“Booty shorts,” she says, and touches her mouth in surprise.  _ “Ooh,  _ I can say that in Language?”

 

“Teach me Blue,” he says, and she turns around and eyes his screen. There’s nothing there, though, which forces her to believe he’s being sincere. He hopes.

 

“The water’s gotten into your monitor,” she says, knocking on it. Little sparks appear on the screen--

 

“Ow.”

 

“Oops.” She turns around again, flopping down on the beach in order to dip her feet in the water. There’s a dropoff right where the sand leads into the water; like everything else in the universe, this planet is trying to kill them. “But, like I said: you’ve lost your mind. If you had one to begin with.”

 

He ignores the jab, for once, and sits down beside her. He’s not certain precisely how close he can get before she’ll deem it Too Much and nudge him away. So he rests his hands in his lap, perfectly casual, and waits for her to get closer.

 

She doesn’t, and he realizes she’s actually waiting for an answer.

 

“I’m almost finished with Heist,” he says softly. “I’ll need something else to keep me entertained.”

 

“And something to keep me here,” she mutters, looking into the water. 

 

“I didn’t think of that,” he says, and his screen reflects a glass cup into the water. Petrichor watches the lines and edges blur. She thinks about the Princess, again.

 

“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “At the end of the day, we’ll both go back to where we were before. So what if you can speak Blue.”

 

He very pointedly doesn’t offer to teach her Language. Instead, he scoots over, letting their thighs touch. Petrichor pretends not to notice.

 

“We can all learn new skills from time to time,” he says. “As evidenced by your, ah...”

 

“Don’t you dare,” she says. 

 

“Yes, ‘cooking’ strikes me as a rather strong term for the act,” he says, and she shoves him into the water. He coughs several times, then surfaces, doing a very bad impression of a doggy paddle. “You could have killed me!”

 

“And we would all be better off for it,” Petrichor says, sticking out her tongue at him. She pokes at the hem of her top; it’s like a less-comfortable sports bra.

 

“You had no idea I could swim,” he says. “For that matter, wouldn’t someone like you think my wires would be frayed?”

 

“I did,” she says, and jumps in after him. He splashes her, and she splashes him back, and eventually she gets on top of him with his arms around her, and she’s ditched her top and bottom in favor of more comfortable arrangements. Which is to say: buck ass naked.  _ Take that, Princess,  _ she thinks.

 

“You’ve been acting strangely,” he says, and she raises an eyebrow. 

 

“I’m just  _ learning new skills,”  _ she says, tightening her hold around his neck. IV worries that if she squeezed her arms properly, she could probably strangle him, which is always a dangerous position to be in with Petrichor. 

 

“Like wearing a dress?” he asks anyway, and she smacks the side of his monitor, more gently this time.

 

“I thought... nevermind,” she says, doing the thing he hates the most. And also ensuring that he’ll ask after her. 

 

IV touches her cheek and waits.

 

“You’re a total sap, you know that?” Petrichor detaches herself from him and swims back to land, climbing out with half an ounce of regret about tossing off her clothes. IV’s screen displays a beach ball rolling, which Petrichor doesn’t care to interpret.

 

She wipes herself off as best she can with her palms and walks back into the ship. 

 

“Oh, thank God,” Marko notes. “She’s gone back to normal.”

 

**

 

She spends the rest of the day drowning herself in Heist. IV turns up once or twice, sort of hanging around awkwardly, but disappears once he realizes she’s not going to acknowledge him. Squire comes around to get a toy of his that somehow ended up under the bed (Petrichor knows IV planted it), and scatters at her irritated glance.

 

Things don’t begin to look up until very much later, when Petrichor goes back to bed with her hair up in a very tall bun. IV is busy pointedly lying at a distance that can’t openly be called too close or too far away, so Petrichor shifts herself into his arms and rests her head on his chest, where even he feels warm.

 

Later in the night, she wakes up to find IV dreaming again. His entire screen is taken up by her face: laughing, running her hands through her hair, smirking at him. The background behind her is a kind of fuzzy dream-thing: it could be the ship, it could be the beach, it could be almost anywhere in the galaxy. Petrichor notices that the dream-her is wearing a very normal black top and pants, and watches as the dream-IV begins to remove both. Then she whacks IV, who wakes up with an  _ “ow--”, _ to which she says “Sorry, bug on your screen,” and curls up to be the little spoon tonight, with IV’s confused monitor casting light across her shoulder onto the bed.

 

**

IV turns up in the kitchen late a few mornings after that; late enough that all the plates and things have already come and gone and been dumped in the sink. Marko is sitting at the table, drinking what doesn’t pass for real coffee and reading what doesn’t pass for real literature. He looks up, and IV shifts slightly.

 

“Yeah?” Marko says. 

 

IV waves and tries:  _ “Sal’.” _

 

Marko drops his cup.   
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Yes, there's a meaning to every one of IV's monitor images; I took a break of a couple months from writing this and totally forgot half, but if I could figure 'em out from there, so can you! Or, you know, leave a comment and I'll just tell you. Please don't make me translate the Blue.
> 
> (Oh, imagine if we could count on IV improving as the series went on...)


End file.
